ly as
that which in a brilliant setting calls forth the plaudits of the
crowd. I talked to him often of his prospects and hopes; his ambition,
all selfish as it was, fascinated me by its pride and daring. "Ah,
William!" I sometimes thought, "you made a deadly mistake when you cast
me off! You will never find another who can so enter, heart and soul,
into all your brilliant projects!"

He came to me, one morning, rather earlier than his wont. I was
reading, but laid aside my book to greet him.

"What have you there, Juanita? Some young-ladyish romance, I suppose."

"Not at all,--it is a very rational work; though I presume you will
laugh at it, because it contains a little sentiment,--you are grown so
hard and cold, of late."

"Do you think so?" he asked, with a look that belied the charge.

He took up the volume, and, glancing through it, read now and then a
sentence.

"What say you to this, Juanita? 'If we are still able to love one who
has made us suffer, we love him more than ever.' Is that true to your
experience?"

"No," I answered, for I liked at times to approach the topic which was
always uppermost in my mind, and to see his perfect unconsciousness of
it. "If any one had made me suffer, I should not stop to inquire
whether I were able to love him still or not; I should have but one
thought left,--revenge!"

"How very fierce!" he said, laughing. "And your idea of revenge
is--what? To stab him with your own white hand?"

"No!" I said, scornfully. "To kill a person you hate is, to my mind,
the most pitiful idea of vengeance. What! put him out of the world at
once? Not so! He should live," I said, fixing my eyes upon him,--"and
live to suffer,--and to remember, in his anguish, why he suffered, and
to whose hand he owed it!"

It was a hateful speech, and would have repelled most men; for my life
I dared not have made it before John. But I knew to whom I was talking,
and that he had no objection to a slight spice of _diablerie_.

"What curious glimpses of character you open to me now and then," he
said, thoughtfully. "Not very womanly, however."

"Womanly!" I cried. "I wonder what a man's notion of woman is! Some
soft, pulpy thing that thrives all the better for abuse? a spaniel that
loves you more, the more you beat it? a worm that grows and grows in
new rings as often as you cut it asunder? I wonder history has never
taught you better. Look at Judith with Holofernes,--Jael with
Sisera,--or if you wan